Why don't you supply a link so the community can make up its own mind, rather than having you frame the story for them? To judge by what you just posted, it sounds like your earlier posts have been breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which would explain why users flagged them and/or mods moderated them.
HN's standard is clear: this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Everything else follows. It isn't for flamewars, and while some political overlap is inevitable, comments must be thoughtful and substantive. Using the site primarily for political battle is not allowed, nor is flamebait (nationalistic flamebait in particular), and you can't take a thread off on inflammatory tangents, as you just did with this comment here. (I detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233229 and marked it off-topic.)
Does that mean HN is or isn't "some sort of open discussion space where critical questioning is allowed"? That depends on how you define that. If by "open" you mean open to arbitrary flamewar, HN is not. Such discussion spaces destroy themselves pretty quickly, so it's not clear how "open" they remain in the long run anyhow. HN's goal, from the beginning, has been not to destroy itself in this way.
HN's standard is clear: this is a site for intellectual curiosity. Everything else follows. It isn't for flamewars, and while some political overlap is inevitable, comments must be thoughtful and substantive. Using the site primarily for political battle is not allowed, nor is flamebait (nationalistic flamebait in particular), and you can't take a thread off on inflammatory tangents, as you just did with this comment here. (I detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233229 and marked it off-topic.)
Does that mean HN is or isn't "some sort of open discussion space where critical questioning is allowed"? That depends on how you define that. If by "open" you mean open to arbitrary flamewar, HN is not. Such discussion spaces destroy themselves pretty quickly, so it's not clear how "open" they remain in the long run anyhow. HN's goal, from the beginning, has been not to destroy itself in this way.